He recovered himself quick and jumped after it, but I had time to give it another push, and that carried it out over his head.
“Ho!” says I. “Don’t you wish you’d learned to swim when you was a boy?” He made a jump for me, mad as a hornet, but I knew a trick worth two of that. I took the heel of my hand and just skipped the top of the water with it. You know how to do it. It shoots a shower into the other fellow’s face and blinds him for a minute. I shot a couple into Mr. Jap’s face and then swam away without hurrying over it.
In a second I caught up with the canoe and towed it to the citadel, where we pulled it up on shore.
“Tallow,” says Mark, “you’re p-promoted for gallantry under f-f-fire, and for presence of mind in an emergency.”
That made me feel pretty good, for Mark don’t praise unless praise is earned. Motu came over, too, and says:
“It was very well done. Some day you will be a leader of fighting-men.”
I guess I blushed.
Mark walked around the place a couple of times to get the lay of the land, I expect, though goodness knows he ought to have known it by heart before. At any rate, he had looked it over enough.
So you will understand, I’ll tell you just how the citadel lay. Maybe it would be best to furnish you with a little map of the hotel and the island where the citadel was, for you can always tell better by a map than any other way. So you’ll find a map alongside some place.
